Built by a production company that got tired of starting over
The photos, the walkthrough, the rates, the owner's number, the note about why the last show passed. We kept rebuilding that from scratch on our own productions, so we stopped.
The information exists on every job. It just lives in five places.
It is split across a photo gallery, a spreadsheet and somebody's phone, and rebuilt from nothing on the next show. LocoBase puts it in one library, groups it the way the script breaks down, and shows the director, the producer and the office each the version they need.
The worksheet came from one afternoon: a location manager on our show had the locking sheet, the DOOD and the logistics log as three tabs of one spreadsheet, and the tabs disagreed about which day a bar was ours. One sheet that reads both ways fixed it.
New York, film people and engineers in one room
LocoBase is developed by CineTools and powered by Prodigium Pictures, a production company based in New York with ten years of independent film in Los Angeles behind it and best known for the HBO Max docu-series Gaming Wall St. CineTools is the software studio we spun out of Prodigium after G-Casper, our open-source call sheet software, ended up on more shows than we could count.
CineTools is led by Tobias Deml, PGA producer, line producer and cinematographer (Luc Besson's June & John), and Tessa Byford, a PGA producer who produced Gaming Wall St and production supervised the A24 picture The Inspection. Both times the pattern was the same: hit a gap on our own show, work around it twice, build the fix the third time.